


Truisms

by orphan_account



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: M/M, aka idealism is dead so THERE joshua graham, legion wins ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 13:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6241054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of harsh realities about life, and Arcade Gannon is saddled with almost all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truisms

Lovers make poor confidants.

Your mother told you that.

Your mother was right about a lot of things that she told you when she was still alive. Lovers make poor confidants. Regimes rise and fall like the sun. There’s no use in mourning. A good book is sometimes better than a good man. Idealism will never survive reality.

She was right about the world, and how it never stops bleeding, and right about it needing healers always. You found the world needy enough to forgive the sins of a past that mostly didn’t even belong to you, and slid into its hands easy enough. The Followers were just glad for another body to sow the seeds of healing across the wasteland. At least, that’s what it seemed like. And you had accepted that; you were ready for a quiet life of squinting at a blinking greentext program, looking over the chemical components of the plants your fellow Followers had recently acquired. A new mutation of broc flower. About as promising as everything else.

And then you had heard it, like a distant thunder. Gunshots, a whole volley of them, and there had been a ruckus in the courtyard of the Old Fort. You didn’t bother to rush out, but you did bother to lean back in your chair a little, peeping out the dust-soiled flap in the medical research tent. You could make out a figure, and so much red that it couldn’t possibly all spring from the same source. That wasn’t medically possible, you thought.

You swung your chair forward, and squinted at your computer screen again.

-

The thing about not being a people person is that you don’t have to deal with people while they’re awake. That means absolutely jack shit when they’re asleep, though, and Julie had made her point when she’d set down a pot of coffee and a cup in front of you. Night duty.

It isn’t the worst thing in the world, looking over someone who’s out like a light. Just boring, and tedious, but that might as well be the description on your job title, in general: able to withstand both boredom and tedium; insomniacs preferred. You pour out your coffee into your mug and settle into an issue of La Phantoma that you’d swiped from the general quarters, ready to make a couple hours at least a little bearable. You’re about five pages in before you realize you feel something staring at you.

The thing about not being a people person, really, is that you aren’t great at dealing with people. And you are not a people person, so when you lowered your comic book and find two bright eyes staring back at you, you kind of froze up for a second. It takes you another second to remember that Julie probably wouldn’t have assigned you to a strung out chem fiend all alone. Probably.

“Hey.” you say, your voice a little squeaky from dust and disuse you clear it.

“Hey.” he replies. At least, you think they’re a he. It’s kind of difficult to tell with all the augs you can get nowadays. He stares at you, and you get to arguing whether his eyes were bronze or gold in your head. Which is stupid, but you’re feeling pretty stupid, and arguing with yourself iss easier than talking to a stranger.

“Hazel.” he says, and you blink at him. “My eyes are hazel. At least, that’s what my ma called ‘em.”

“Oh. Right.” You can feel your pasty cheeks go hot in the lamplight between the two of you. His mouth curls at one edge, grin lopsided. His lips are chapped. Probably spent too long in the sun, by the looks of the red painting patches of his dark skin.

“It’s okay. You ain’t the first. ‘N I don’t mind starin’ at you, besides.” he says, and you feel the tips of your ears go hot, too. You don’t get how people can be this straightforward about things. Or maybe he’s not, maybe you’re misreading everything and he’s just being friendly. The Mojave is a weird place for friendliness, though. “I’m Lux.”

You feel your eyebrows arch at that. “Roman, isn’t it?”

He shrugs. “’S what my ma named me. Well, Pollux, actually. I have a sister named Castor, too. Wasn’t nobody plannin’ on Caesar back then, you know?”

And you do. You feel the line of your shoulders relax, just a little.

“We all draw from the same well, anyway. I’m Arcade. Or Gannon. Whichever suits your fancy.” And he smiles again, in a way that has to be rehearsed for how charming it is. His teeth flash white between his lips.

The man – Lux – moves to sit up in his cot and you can see the bandages running down his torso. It’s only now that you connect him – dark, and tall, with a mop of curly black hair – as the figure that was drenched in blood just the other morning. You know Julie – she doesn’t waste dressings when they’re not needed. All you can figure is that he needed them in a bad way, and maybe all of that was his blood, after all.

“So what do you do around here, Arcade? Or Gannon.” he asks, and you shrug, though you’re smiling. That was a stupid joke, and utterly charming.

“Mostly, hope.” you reply, taking a sip of your coffee, and he makes a little look of sympathy for you.

“Sounds boring.” he tells you.

“They tell me it’s noble.”

“So is cleaning up raiders. Rebuilding the Mojave.” he offers, and you pretend you don’t get what he’s saying because honestly, isn’t wanting a better world what gets people into trouble in the first place?

“Is that what you do?” you ask him instead of agreeing. He keeps on grinning anyway.

“It is. You should try it.”

“Oh, see, the thing about that is, I’ve got this terrible allergy to bullets. And plasma rays. And pain. Especially pain.” you wince, and he laughs at that. It’s a deep noise that comes from his belly, and he doesn’t even seem to flinch at whatever wounds he has to be agitating with that kind of a gesture. When it dies down, he looks at you again, and his here-there eyes are twinkling.

“I make a pretty good shield.” he says. “And I’m told I take a shot to the head well enough. But I think you can see that in that kind of line, I could use a big, strong doctor to patch me up.”

You stare at him.

“Flattery will get you everywhere.” you say, because there’s nothing else that’s appropriately biting, and now that stupid idiot has you smiling, too.

“Tell me about it.” he says. “I’m a courier. It’s my job to carry messages, in various forms. Sometimes that requires a little bit of charm.”

“Not grace?” you ask, and he shakes his head.

“No room for grace in the Mojave.” he says.

And that, too, is something your mother told you.

-

He was absolutely telling the truth about having no grace. You have literally never met another human being who fails harder at trying to figure out computer algorithms and seems to have absolutely no concept of which end of the plasma pistol to point away from himself.

Lux isn’t stupid though.

You’ve seen him figure out a bombing path on the first run. He has the sharpest eyes you’ve ever seen when it comes to finding traps, and his thin fingers deftly work each one to uselessness. He moves on silent feet, hugging corners and figures, your own pulse louder than his breath as he sneaks behind your enemies, disarms them in one hit and slits their throats on the upswing.

But he isn’t just a killer, the silent death of him not half of what he can do. You’ve seen that, too, and you keep seeing it every time he interacts with somebody whose teeth aren’t shaking with pent up chems.

He charms and wheedles and needles and convinces and argues, and he wins. He wins people over to his way of thinking, whatever it takes, and you always leave with a hundred more friends than you came in with. In a matter of weeks, he has the whole of the Strip under his thumb, and a handful of tribes, too, and everywhere you go in Freeside, someone is shoving caps or food or stimpacks into your hands to take to him.

Lovers make poor confidants, but he is no one’s lover. Instead, he’s everyone’s confidant, and you watch men and women open up their hearts to him. His shoulders must be really absorbent, because no matter how much people cry on one or the other, he always seems to come out of it sunny enough.

“I’m glad we could get Joana out of that pinch. And off medex.” he tells you with a smile, staring up at the stars. You don’t know how he did it, how he snuck a group of indentured sex workers out of the Strip and talked down the Omertas that followed them. You have absolutely no idea. Except that he lied, and he lied really fast and really well, and Joana got her happily ever after with her man, as far as you know.

You don’t know why Lux did it. They didn’t pay him anything.

But then, you know why he did it. He helps people.

You swallow, looking at him while he looks at the stars.

“Lux.” you say, and he doesn’t look at you.

“Yeah, Gannon?” he asks, and when you don’t answer, he finally turns his head. You swallow again. It isn’t helping.

“We need to talk.”

He looks into your eyes and he is not your lover. He is not your lover, you remind yourself. No matter how many nights you’ve spent curled against his back, the two of you sharing a bed for convenience or necessity; no matter how many times you’ve touched his body to bandage his wounds; no matter how long you’ve spent staring at his eyes instead of his mouth, even when he’s talking to other people; he’s still not your lover.

So you spill your guts to him about the Enclave. About your father, and your mother, and your erstwhile family. And Lux listens to you with that serious thoughtfulness his face gets when he’s helping someone shift the world off of their own shoulders and on to his. He stays like that until you finish.

“Will you help me?” you ask, and after a moment, he nods his head. You feel a rush of breath leave your chest, and just barely resist a nervous giggle. “When?”

“Soon.” Lux tells you.

“When?” you ask again, because sometimes persistence pays off with him and sometimes it doesn’t. Tonight, it doesn’t, and Lux turns over onto his back, staring up at the stars.

“Soon.” he says, and you know it’s a promise.

-

“I’m sorry, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up.” you tell him, and Lux turns to look at you, one of his thick brows rising northwards on his forehead. You fix him with a Look. “Am I playing Virgil to your Dante? Because I can’t think of any other explanation as to why we’re here, and you’re handing your weapons over to Caesar’s guards.”

Lux’s lips twitch, and he just barely resists laughing. You absolutely hate that he can do that at a time like this, when you’re surrounded on all sides by Legoinaries. By their dogs. By their extremely pointy weapons, while your companion is being divested of the only things that could possibly stand between you and those pointy weapons.

“Relax. We’re here to hear what Caesar has to say.” he soothes. Despite yourself, you can feel it working. His voice is something deep and soft, it has a way of smoothing over whatever doubts you have. But just now you’ve got a lot of doubts, and they’re not put to bed so easily.

“Short of ‘you’re right Gannon, what was I thinking, let’s get the hell back on the raft’, that was probably the best thing you could have said.” you tell him, reluctantly handing over your laser pistol to one of the gate guards, who gives you an imperious sneer from behind his glasses. You just barely stop yourself from returning it, and choose to pad up to your fearless leader instead. “But if we travel at Caesar’s leisure, we may not leave so easily.”

Lux just shrugs. “We’ve been in worse spots. Trust me.”

And you do. Despite yourself, you do. Lux is not your lover, but he is your confidant, and you trust him to make this work like he makes everything work. You follow him up the steep hill, up the wooden steps, ignoring the boys who are running up and down and all around, fighting each other with sticks. You partially ignore one of the slaves, a beast of burden with their back piled high, only stopping to catch one of them before they stumble. An older woman, someone who could have been your mother if your mother was the kind of woman who would allow herself to be stooped low at any point in her life.

But that’s all you do, because Lux is still plodding along, and there’s another gate to get through. More people to ignore. Another, smaller hill, and a tent where they make you stand outside while Lux has an audience with Caesar.

You can hear some of it, but not most. Bits and pieces, commendations on the work that Lux has been doing. When they let you in to the tent, the guard follows, and you realize all too late what’s happening.

“Your new doctor.” Lux says, and the betrayal hits you in waves. Three little words, and a spear pressed against the back of your neck, and wave after wave of ‘how could you’ and –

“I trusted you.” you tell him, all cold fury in your voice and in your veins. Your voice raises to a shout, breaks with disuse and dust. “I trusted you!”

He looks at you with sad, understanding eyes, and that’s the worst pain of all.

“I know.” he says, and someone hits you on the back of the skull with something hard, and your world hits black.

-

Caesar’s name is Edward Sallow.

He doesn’t make you wear a slave collar.

You are his slave, but he doesn’t make you wear a collar, and you know that’s significant for a man who likes to make such a big show out of his powers of control. He’s a man of about fifty, much shorter than you. You’d heard he was bald, but up close you can see that he does have hair – very fine, very blond hair that’s buzzed so close to his head he might as well have none. He’s broad set in his body but not his face, though he has a nose and jaw that are nothing if not commanding.

He doesn’t make you wear a collar, but when he talks to you, he puts his hand on your shoulder, and even though he’s reaching up it still makes you feel small. It’s the kind of a gesture you imagine he mastered many years ago, though you can’t for the life of you figure out when. He doesn’t ever really touch the other officers unless it’s to pound their faces into the ground for disrespecting him.

And he does that last bit really well. Really, really well. That powerfist of his, even falling apart, is no laughing matter.

“I’m curious.” you say one day, running your fingers across his arm after he’s taken it off. You have to inspect the body beneath for strain from using it, those power weapons are just removable augs and it’s not like they take care of what they’re wrapped around. He overextends the tendons in his wrist regularly. “For someone who purports to think that technology is the bane of civilization, you seem to be rather fond of it.”

“Technology is the bane of humanity.” he replies, his deep voice an amused rumble in the hot air. You look into his eyes; they’re black, shining flints. “I’m a god.”

“You’re insane.” you reply, and he slaps your cheek good naturedly.

“Shut up, Graham.”

“Gannon.” you reply, and he sobers right up, looking at you hard for a moment.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” he asks in a way that tells you it would be best not to correct him. So you don’t, knitting your brows together as you explore the gap of muscle between his forefinger and thumb.

“Of course it is.” you murmur, and feel sweat drip down the small of your back.

-

You rarely see Lux any more. If you do, it’s in the moments where he’s giving a report to Sallow. He’s still like a shadow, there and just barely noticeable before he’s sliding off again.

Castor, his sister, brings you books sometimes, when Sallow is talking to his men. She’s five foot nothing and you’ve seen her tear the head off of a nightstalker with her hands and teeth in the pit. They tell you she’s the woman fronting the daughters of Hecate, a special team of legionaries who will ride chariots strapped to trained centaurs into battle. She doesn’t mention any of that when she sees you.

“Why do you keep bringing these for me?” you ask her. “Where do you even get these?”

She looks at you for a minute and pops the wad of bubblegum she’s been chewing.

“My brother sends them.” she says, and you frown.

“Then why doesn’t he give them to me himself?”

She shrugs her slim shoulders.

“Probably because he loves you. It wouldn’t be smart to give him competition.” she says, and slips out the way she came in, leaving you with one edition of Antony & Cleopatra and a very puzzled expression.

-

The thing about Sallow is that he’s very smart.

He’s megalomaniacal, he’s absolutely pompous, and arrogant, and vicious. But he’s very smart, and he’s ruthless enough to get things done. And with Lux and Castor and the other commanders, the battle at the dam is over before it begins.

You watch from the distance of the Fort. The echoes of bombshells and gunfire and screams make it back to you. If you stand out on the hill, you can see where explosions glitter in the distance. It smells like death, even across the water, and you do little to try and shut yourself away.

Reality comes back in the form of a triumph. Castor and the daughters have tied some of the less fortunate of the NCR troops to the backs of their wagons, and they come in stooped low and stumbling to keep up with the roll of the chariot wheels. You recognize some of their faces, soldiers that Pollux and you played nice with until you were enslaved.

They torture them for amusement. Make them fight each other to the death in the pit, string them up and cut off limbs from the feet up until they go into shock or bleed out. Some they light on fire, and watch run around until they succumb.

For once, the Legion flows with wine. Chems are strictly forbidden, but wine is permitted on special occasions. And this is the occasion. Even Caesar brings a bottle to you, laughing as he presses it to your lips. He’s very drunk, and you’re very disgusted.

“Just a sip.” he slurs, and guffaws when you try to push him away, unsuccessfully.

“As your physician, I’d advise against it.” you tell him, trying for stern but ending up sulky.

“’S your god, I’d suggest you get on with it.” he tells you, slumping against your side. His arm is around your shoulders, his stubble burning at your cheek. “Cammonnn. Little Mormon bitch…”

When you finally take a chug, he lets out a whoop and falls backwards onto his bed, flushed in the face. You move to make sure he’s not about to pass out, and the room sort of spins a little. You never drink, and between the vile taste and this immediately vile feeling, you’re never going to ever again.

“Oh god.” you murmur, and Sallow reaches out with his hand, blindly grabbing for you.

You let him, your head shifting like an afterimage as he grabs it, consciousness following physical movement. His stubble burns your chin and cheek and he kisses you, sudden and hard. For a couple of seconds that’s all that happens, because your face is burning and your throat is burning but your veins are cold, and then he breaks back, laughing, his eyes still closed.

“We showed those rat bastards.” Sallow says, drifting off. “Didn’t we, Graham-“

“Gannon.” you mumble.

He snores.

-

The worst thing out of everything, you think, is that they were right.

Sallow and Lux and everyone in the Legion. They were right.

Not about Sallow being a god, of course not. But they were right about being able to wipe out the NCR. And they were right about taking out Mr. House. And they were right about being able to sweep up all of the chems, and gambling, and everything that the Followers couldn’t put a stop to.

They were right about stabilizing the area. And they were right about people wanting to join something bigger than themselves. Something with more protection.

Sallow doesn’t make you wear a collar, but you’re still his slave. And all the books and arguments and games of chess in the world can’t stop you from feeling powerless as the Legion steamrolls its way through the ideal of a world that you set up in your dreams.

You think of the truths in this world that are unrelenting, and cold, and harsh. You think of them as you take the scalpel from your doctor’s bag, and unbutton your shirt.

Lovers make poor confidants. Regimes rise and fall like the sun. There’s no use in mourning. A good book is sometimes better than a good man. Idealism will never survive reality.

Your mother was right about a lot of things that she told you when she was still alive.

You’ll have to tell her when you meet again.


End file.
